


the Other Friend

by fourshoesfrank



Category: Coraline (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Picking Names, Post-Canon, Speech Disorders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:47:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27879369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: The Cat brings the Other Wybie into the real world. Coraline and Wybie's duo becomes a trio.
Relationships: Coraline Jones & The Other Wybie, Coraline Jones & Wybie Lovat, The Cat & Coraline Jones, Wybie Lovat & The Other Wybie
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35





	the Other Friend

The Cat knew many of the Beldam's tricks, but this was a new low, even for her. Creating an Other Friend? It had never been done, not in the Cat's five lives' worth of memory. She had always confined her mimicry to the victim's own family, along with whoever happened to live in the Pink Palace's other apartments.

The Boy was just the landlady's grandson. He'd never lived in the Palace, never even actually entered its rooms for himself; he just liked to hunt for slugs in the yard. Was that grounds to mimic him? The Cat didn't think so. The Cat thought that the Beldam was breaking her own rules. 

None of that mattered anymore, even if it was the only thing the Cat could seem to think about. What mattered was the impending abduction of the New Child, the Coraline-Child, and what would happen to her. Maybe she'd get caught, maybe she wouldn't. 

Maybe her parents would be taken and she would be forced to return. With the Cat's help. He tells her to challenge the Beldam mostly for her own sake, but also because a challenge will take the attention off of the Other Boy. Maybe, just maybe, the Cat will be able to take the Other Boy back to the real world, the one with the True Boy. The Cat's Boy. 

The Cat found the Other Boy cowering in front of the doorway between the worlds. He looked a little worse for wear, missing his right hand and with some stitches coming undone in his face, but for the most part, he was alright. The Cat told him that they must leave, _quickly,_ if he wanted to live beyond tonight. The Other Boy swallowed (nevermind that his throat was just a sackcloth tube full of sand) and nodded. He opened the door. 

It was just as dusty and cobwebbed as it had been the last time the Girl traveled through it from this side. The Cat would have sighed in relief if cats did such a thing as sigh. He had been worried that the passage wouldn't be there at all. 

The Other Boy started crawling, going slowly at first to push the cobwebs out of the way, but he picked up some speed as he got farther and farther away from the Other World. The Cat watched him go with a feeling in his heart that would have produced a smile, if he had lips. 

-

Coraline and Wybie came across the Other Wybie two days after they trapped the Beldam's hand in the old well. The real Wybie, the talkative Wybie, had been hearing weird noises outside his window, so he'd roped Coraline into investigating. 

They'd expected to find a family of raccoons, or a skunk, or  _maybe_ a homeless guy's campsite. The two kids definitely hadn't expected to find a third kid, with fogged-over eyes and a missing hand, wandering around the woods bumping into trees and crying to himself. 

The fact that the kid looked like Wybie wasn't even the weirdest part. He was also kind of naked. _Very_ naked.

Coraline yelped and very pointedly stared at the other kid's face, keeping her chin tilted well away from the... area that was exposed. Wybie himself, however, dropped the camera he'd been carrying and started stepping back, towards the house. Coraline caught his retreating sleeve in her fist and hissed, "Give him your coat," without any other word of explanation. 

Wybie stood frozen, staring at the Other. He looked just like Wybie. Well, Wybie didn't have cataracts, and he still had both hands, and there weren't two weird scars on his cheeks, but other than that, the imitation was dead-on. Wybie had the weird feeling that that was what this was, an imitation. Not a long-lost relative, just a sort of living copy. A doppelgänger, maybe, if that was what the word meant. He wasn't too good at German. 

Coraline seemed to know this Other Wybie, though. She'd given him her yellow rain jacket, which was now tied around his waist like an apron. She was talking to him now, too, asking questions about the Beldam and Wybie's cat and the tunnel inside the Pink Palace. The Other kept shaking his head back and forth, except the motion was also sort of up-and-down because his neck had the same tilt that Wybie's did. Another imitation. 

"You can't talk in this world either?" Coraline was asking him, while Wybie still stood off to the side staring at his double. He shook himself out of it and joined the discussion, ready with a few questions of his own. 

"I thought you died," Wybie said. "Coraline found your clothes hanging from the Palace's roof. How'd you get out?"

The Other Wybie hunched down and pretended to crawl through the fog, pawing the air in front of him to make sure he wasn't going to run into anything. His head smacked into Wybie's shins anyway, and the Other fell back with a cry of surprise. He clapped his hands to his mouth, like the sound was more shocking than the impact itself. 

Coraline looked just as surprised. "You can talk here!" she exclaimed, rushing over to the Other Wybie to help him up. A grin made its way across her face as she hauled him to his feet, a hopeful grin that seemed to light up her entire face like his motorcycle's headlight. "You can talk here!" she repeated, grinning even wider as she did so. "That's great! Say something, Wy— Other Wybie, come on!"

The Other opened his mouth, took a breath, and produced a quiet moan. 

"Huh?"

Wybie stepped closer to Coraline and his double. They both looked as confused as he felt, which was comforting. This wasn't more weird Beldam stuff that he'd been kept out of the loop on. 

"Can't you say your name, at least?" Coraline suggested. 

Wybie nodded in agreement even though the Other couldn't see either of them. "Yeah, try your name. Just say 'Wybie'. I don't care if we share it." He really didn't care. He didn't care for the name at all, to be honest, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to get rid of it, pawn it off on somebody else. 

The Other made a sound halfway between "ooooo" and "aaaauuuu". His mouth snapped shut immediately afterward, and stayed that way for several days. 

-

Coraline and Wybie agreed that they had to tell Wybie's Grandma about the Other Wybie, but they argued about how to break the news for a long time. Coraline wanted to just walk in and present him to her; Wybie argued that that was a terrible idea and they should probably broach the subject gently, and when she was in a good mood. 

They ended up using Coraline's idea. Grandma took it considerably well, no fainting or evileye-ing at all. She knew more about the Beldam than either of them had expected. She knew of the Beldam's cruelty, and was proud of the Other Wybie for having escaped her, despite being one of her creations. 

It probably helped that they'd put some clothes on the Other before they sat down with Grandma, too. 

-

Before they introduced the Other Wybie to anybody else in Ashton, he needed a new name. More than that; he  _wanted_ a new name. Coraline checked out a door-stopper compilation of baby names from the public library after her mom took her shopping for school supplies, and she brought it to Wybie's house the next day. The three of them sat in a circle (a triangle? there  were only three of them) on Wybie's bedroom floor, flipping through the pages and writing down anything that sounded good to the Other Boy. 

"Beatrice," Coraline read off the page. "Comes from a word for 'voyager'." She glanced up at the Other. "You like it?"

He shrugged, then shook his head. Coraline turned the page and read the next suggestion: "Beau, means 'beautiful' in French."

Another head shake. This time, Wybie spun the book around so he could have a turn reading the names. "Beckett means 'stream' or 'brook'," he suggested, but the Other didn't like that one much either. 

They kept going, though, collecting more names on the college-ruled notebook paper on Coraline's lap until they came to the Z's, the last section. 

"We have seventeen options already," she said after counting them under her breath. "You could just pick from what we've got, if you want."

The Other shook his head yet again and tapped on the book impatiently.  _Hurry up._

Wybie snatched the book from Coraline again. "Here, let me read," he said. "Ooh, Zadok sounds cool! Doesn't say what it means, though. Isn't it from the Bible or something?"

Coraline shrugged, the Other shook his head, and Wybie sighed and read another. "Zahir? Means 'helper'. No? Okay. Uh, Za... Zainudden means 'the beauty of religion' in Arabic. Do you speak Arabic?"

"I doubt the Beldam would've paid for lessons," Coraline said with a wry, this-joke-might-fall-flat-but-what-the-hell tone in her voice. No need for such misgivings; the Other Boy snorted and shook his head in agreement almost at once. 

A few minutes passed and they came to the end of the book. The Other Boy didn't like the very last name offered (Zuzana) and so the three of them began going back over the names that he had enjoyed. They deliberated for almost a whole hour, crossing things off the list and occasionally replacing them with similar-sounding names. Finally, the Other made his choice. 

"Okay," Coraline said, staring down at the final three names on the list. "Ready?"

The Other nodded. 

"Alright. Anna, Sullivan, or Obadiah?"

He ticked them off on his fingers, then raised the third up into the air. Obadiah smiled. He had a name. 

"Nice," Wybie remarked with an approving nod. Coraline nodded too, and started to give Obadiah a thumbs-up before she remembered that he couldn't see anymore. 

A thought dawned on her. "We could call you Obie, for short! It rhymes with Wybie and everything." This time, Obie gave  _her_ a thumbs-up. Coraline's smile widened. "Come on, let's go tell your grandma!"

**Author's Note:**

> woohoo thanks 4 reading leave comment/kudos if you feel so inclined


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